Hacker Atlas - Map of Hacker News topics
Show HN: Hacker Atlas - A map of what Hacker News talks about
Hacker Atlas is an interactive map that visualizes what Hacker News talks about, organizing discussions into 206 topics. It tracks post volumes and trends, showing which subjects are heating up or cooling down. For example, AI governance leads with 1,321 posts in the last 30 days, up 1.4×, while tech careers dipped to 0.9×. Whether you're a developer, researcher, or just curious, Hacker Atlas helps you spot emerging trends, understand community interests, and discover valuable content at a glance.
Hacker News, by topic. 206 topics, stories through 9/25/2026.
- pelagicAustral
One thing I've been doing lately is asking for "presidential briefings" on hot threads. I like to read the comments but some threads get really really dense and I just want the gist of it and to get a feel for the general sentiment so I task claude to do a 2 or 3 page max pdf with charts and literally just that a presidential style brief of wtf is going on. It never disappoints =)
- andai
Cool idea!
From the name, I was expecting it would be a spatial tool, i.e. some kind of semantic graph I could navigate. I think that is fruitful territory.
Edit: Oh hey! There is almost exactly what I was visualizing, on the Connections page! This is the coolest part, why isn't this on the front page? (Also, please add scroll to zoom!)
As for the grid, I don't see the value of pagination. I'd rather have it all on one page, so I can scroll, Ctrl+F, etc.
Also, like half of the first page are different kinds of AI? If we want to visualize what % of HN stuff is AI, maybe it would make sense to have a meta-category for that.
(Would also be cool if HN itself supported tags you could toggle... show/hide AI :)
I'm also very curious about the evolution of this data over time. The popularity stats seem to be limited to last 30 days. Would be cool to see stats for all time, and maybe filter by range. (Or graphs? Graphs are cool!)
- random3
I thought it's a collection of maps (what an atlas is). Instead it's a list, 9 items per page, 23 pages - it's an index.
A map lets you see the full picture in a glance.
It seems like a missed opportunity to actually make it an atlas.